Firewire Harddrive problems! Please advise.

I'm having trouble with my newly installed firewire drive. I keep getting The :'cannot get information quick enough...........lack of bandwidth...' Error on screen when i'm using small ammounts of audio tracks. I have been using my system drive up too now with no real problems of this kind. I've just filled it with projects that i am currently working on. I would gladly just install it as a secondary IDE internal drive but my stupid Dell machine only supports one Hard Drive on the IDE bus. (Stupid or what!) I didn't know this at the time of purchase. Any way, I also have gotten a Blue screen when i boot up my machine with the firewire drive already turned on. The Error message is : IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL So now i'm thinking it might be something to do with the IRQ sharing. In all honesty I have no knowledge about this so please help! The drive i'm using is a Western Digital 120Gb and the Caddy is an ICY BOX IB-350-BL series. I am plugging it into a firewire PCI card which i do not know the name of. I'll find out if needed! My System is a Dell machine 2.5Ghz P4 768Mb ram Win XP I know that it has an oxford 911 chipset though! Sorry for the long Post, Any suggestions welcomed. Cheers, John Joe.

Do you have XP SP2 installed? If so, this article from the MS Knowledgebase might help: You might want to check your IRQ assignments in System Information. I had these kinds of problems (and worse--data loss!) with my Firewire drives when I first installed my Firewire PCI card because the IRQ sharing wasn't working correctly. Windows reported no conflicts/problems, but switching the Firewire card to a different PCI slot solved it for me (I tried lots of different slot combinations until I stumbled on a working config.-- Pain in the a**!) Mike

John Joe Daly, I hate to tell you, unless you have some computer with some chipset made by dell then you most likely have an intel board with intel chips, with an intel made ide controller. Regardless of what the tech moron in india (i am assuming tech support in EU is farmed out to india as well), told you, your computer supports two devices per ide channel. There is one of a couple of possible reasons why it didnt work. I am not sure which mobo you have, but intel installs installs its own bios's in all of their systems. Often times they do limit via the bios what options the user has. It is one possibility that you have to set your bios up to use two drives per channel, this would be hard for me to imagine but still a possibility. Secondly Dell could have turned off the option for using multiple drives per channel, this is even less likely with dell knowing how many folks need to upgrade to a second hard drive. The final option, and unfortunatly the most likely, is that the tech guys got tired of trying to figure this out, or didnt know what they were talking about and told you that multiple drives per ide channel were not supported. The easiest way to check this out is to go to your bios. I am not sure which screen you need to be looking at, but one of the screens should list the ide drives. You will see ide bus 0 primary and secondary drives, and ide bus 1 primary and secondary drives. It should list your current hard drive via some wierd seiral number and include its specs, as bus 0 primary, and your optical drive as bus 1 and primary. if you have any listings other then these two then it means that your bios is setup to handle multiple drives its just that the drives were not installed properly. Unless you have some microatx board (which i do not think that dell makes) there would be no reason for dell to turn off the secondary ide device option. I just would like to see you be able to record without having to worry about firewire issues. if you need more advice i would be more then happy to provide it if you ask. Christian

By the way, if you do try to reinstall your harddrives, you need to make sure that you set your harddrive jumpers to system drive as master and secondary drive as slave. If the system drive is not set up correctly it will not boot. You need to make sure that you follow the jumper guidelines for each harddrive (should have s sticker above the jumpers), as each harddrive has a different jumper config. Christian

just dont send it to future shop [read my post "the worst has happened" to find out what I just went through]

What you have said makes perfect sense crs117. I'm going to go investigate in the bios settings now! Cheers for the follow up. I can totally see two guys in India shrugging sholders and whispering 'Just tell him that it dosen't support two drives'....'Yeah good idea it's nearly knock off time anyway'. Anyway i'll let ya know how i get on. Thanks again, John Joe.